Announcing Indie Quilt

Indie Quilt is a collaborative game comprised of 30-second gameplay experiences from a number of devs, organized by @Erichermit.  If you’ve seen Wario Ware, you’re familiar with the concept.

Interested devs have until August 17th to submit a Unity scene containing their game.  If you’ve been wanting to start learning Unity since their new 2D update, this is the perfect opportunity to begin with a simple game project.

  • Game must be won or lost in under 30 seconds, returning a boolean
  • Game must support 10 difficulty settings
  • Controls: WASD keys, Space, and Mouse. Controller input optional.

From the Indie Quilt site:

This collaborative game will be sold, and all proceeds from the game will go straight to the charity Child’s Play.

You can contribute with almost any game-related skillset you have! If you’re a gamedev, contributing a minigame is obviously the easiest way. However, if you are instead (or also!) an artist, musician, or some other creator then by offering resources for use in this collaboration you can also have a direct impact and meaningful contribution.

I will be submitting a simple 2D chase game of my own and hope plenty of other devs participate, either with new games or by submitting pieces of older games.  If you have any questions, direct them to @Erichermit or erichornby@pelagicgames.com

Releasing a Social Justice Warriors Game

[note this was written in May 2014 following the game’s initial release]

As I explained in my last post, Making a Social Justice Warriors Game, I made a Social Justice Warriors game.  I recommend reading that post to find out why I would do such a thing.  Having made the game, the next step was to release it.

“It’s a pro-SJW game!”  “No, it’s an anti-SJW game!”

I didn’t make this game with grand ambitions of changing the world, but intending to change a few open-minded people’s perspectives.  It wasn’t meant to mock people who have been labeled as “social justice warriors” nor even the game’s opponents, “trolls”.

tappa tappa tappa

These terms, SJW and troll, are used by a small subset of the internet to dismiss people’s opinions.  Every community tends to adopt similar language.  On stock message boards you’ll see people calling each other out as “pumper” and “short” for the same reasons.  However, since warriors and trolls match up perfectly with RPG fantasy tropes, the game was titled Social Justice Warriors and built to mimic online platforms for sharing opinions while conforming to typical RPG class attacks.

After the game was released, my web traffic exploded with thousands of hits coming from Reddit, Tumblr, Youtube, 4chan, and personal blogs.  Following back all these links brought me to hundreds of assertions about the game and its creator, far outnumbering the number of people who had actually bought and played it.  Many comments ironically resembled the troll comments from within the game – wild accusations, ad hominem attacks, and crude insults – but the most striking aspect of the comments was how they contradicted each other.

pro-SJW game

On one extreme, people insisted the game obviously was made by a SJW seeking revenge against everyone who argued with him on the internet by glorifying himself as a hero and demonizing them as trolls.  Strangely enough, an equal number of people arrived at a completely opposite interpretation that the game was clearly made by someone trying to undermine and discredit the efforts of SJWs.  Few people recognized that this contradiction suggests neither assumption is correct.  It’s not a pro-SJW game or an anti-SJW game, it’s a human game.

anti-SJW game

If you’ve read my post about making the game, you’ll know I had much more moderate intentions.  In fact, my only subversive agenda went completely unnoticed by all: filling the #SocialJusticeWarriors hashtag with silliness about Paladins dueling in the Crusade of the Endless Lance and Mages moralizing in the Summer of the Foul Gauntlet.

Of course, not everyone jumped to the same extreme conclusions.  Jim Sterling from the list of journalists that inspired the game clearly knew what to expect from people online and was content to repost the game’s trailer “to watch the YouTube comments burn.”  Others sought to use the game to advance their own goals or make political statements.  Thanks Obama.

Thanks Obama

“Just who is this game making fun of anyway?”

The pattern that emerged from the comments was that for many people, determining whether it was a good game or a bad game depended on whether the game was making fun of the same people they mock or not.  While I did introduce the game as satire from the start, which implies social criticism, that doesn’t mean it had to take sides with one group against the other.  As I briefly explained in my last post, the game sought to expose fallacies, misunderstandings, and defamation on all sides.  These are human traits not specific to just one labeled subset of humanity.

Who's Social Justice Warriors making fun of?

The trolls are presented in many flavors.   Some wield the incensed rage and wild threats that have become common to see on any internet forum regardless of the topic.  Others present themselves more rationally, making arguments from their personal experiences or their own brand of logic.  This was meant to highlight the prevalence of logical fallacies in online arguments and how easy it is to think that the things we don’t see in our daily lives aren’t a problem elsewhere in the world for other people.  Humans are very driven by personal experience simply because those are the only things we can verify as truth.  Someone arguing with you on the internet is not necessarily a bad person, but could be unable to empathize with you or visualize your situation due to the disparity between their life experiences and your own.

Social Justice Warrior, Troll, exactly the same!

If you looked at this game and thought that reducing a person to a “social justice cleric” who just does the same four things over and over is absurd, perhaps you see how calling a person a “social justice warrior” who represents an equally oversimplified characterization is equally absurd.

The player is presented with many choices of how to present themselves online.  In verbal combat, there is the choice of responding with logical arguments or emotionally-charged character attacks.  When choosing a character, the player is given an option to choose a more inflammatory character, the “social justice rogue”.  Even from the very first menu option, players are given a choice to “Battle for Social Justice” or “Don’t Battle for Social Justice.”  While there’s been lots of talk about the game’s title, I haven’t seen anyone talk about the menu.

Battle for Social Justice?

To me, this is the most important choice both inside and outside the game.  One of the messages of the game was to choose your confrontations wisely.  If you set out to correct every incorrect assumption and hateful remark on the entire internet, you’ll promptly lose yourself in a sea of madness.  Is refuting every person ready to argue with you on Twitter the best way to spend your limited free time?

The other way to interpret the menu options is asking yourself whether you choose to view it as a battle or not. If you consider every encounter to be a battlefield where you and your allies stand on one side and the enemies to your cause stand across from you trading shots, then the discussion will quickly turn to defamation and insults without any social progress.

If you look at this question the game’s menu poses and scoff because you already know better, then the game probably has nothing more to teach you and you can choose “Don’t Battle for Social Justice,” which will exit the game by way of the credits.  In addition to recognizing Justin’s fantastic music and Maarten’s pixel warriors, the credits offer a quote attributed to Mark Twain, another person who often looked at the behavior of the people around him and found it absurd. “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”  Good advice no matter what side of the battle you’re on.

Thanks for Playing

While preparing to release the game, I knew that people would play it and interpret it in different ways, only recognizing some or none of the concepts I encoded in its gameplay mechanics.   I hoped that regardless of their interpretation, some good would still emerge through people reflecting on their reaction to the game and comparing it with other people.  Unfortunately I didn’t anticipate that many people would make assumptions about the game without playing it first, given its tiny $1 price tag.

Nonetheless, I appreciate all the people who have played and sent me feedback about the game.  It will help me refine my future games’ interactions with the players.  I am especially grateful to all the people who generously paid more than $1 for Social Justice Warriors to support the artist, the composer, and myself.

It’s always gratifying when someone acknowledges a tiny detail that you put effort into crafting, like getting the letter spacing just right in the game’s cover image.

Or the one person who commented on the genderless characters.  I discovered it’s a challenging request to ask a pixel artist to make humans with indistinguishable gender and race but I was very happy with the result, hunched over keyboards in the faint blue glow of their computer monitors.

Social Justice Warriors was an experiment for me, not just in human sociology, but in learning how to release a game and deal with what people say about it and its creator.  I learned a lot from the experience and emerged, slightly singed, but prepared to do it again.

You can try Social Justice Warriors yourself and see if it’s a pro-SJW game or an anti-SJW game for less than $8. If you think the game has value, please vote for it on Steam Greenlight. [It was greenlit and released on Steam February 27, 2015! Thank you for your support!] While you’re there, you can check out the more than 400 comments people have left and see how they compare to your own perception of the game.

Making a Social Justice Warriors Game

Update: If you came here by clicking a link telling you this was a pro-SJW game or anti-SJW game, maybe you should read this post.

Last week (May 12, 2014) I released a satirical game called Social Justice Warriors.

Why I Made Social Justice Warriors

I first heard the phrase “social justice warrior” when the image of “SJW videogame journalists to avoid” circulated around the game dev community. I didn’t know anything about the journalists on the list, but it seemed ridiculous that someone was advocating ignoring more than twenty writers from prominent sites. After learning more about the phrase, it struck me as a strange label intended to unilaterally invalidate someone’s opinions and silence them. The words “justice” and “warrior” are too empowering to be wasted in a pejorative label so I decided to respond the best way I know: with a videogame.

I chose not to depict social justice warriors as the negative stereotype but as a symbol for any human standing up against ignorant people. By pairing social justice warriors with the opposing label used to dismiss someone online – troll – in a modernization of a medieval fantasy RPG, I hoped to get people talking about how we interact online.  I have a bad habit of scrolling through the comments sections of every article I read.  Even mundane articles about the third quarter earning reports of aluminum smelting companies are prone to random outbursts of racism and sexism.

There were plenty of tweets flying around turning the SJW journalist image into videogame jokes.

I was happy to make some of them a reality.

The Message in the Gameplay Mechanics

Obviously videogames are a subjective experience and they’ll mean something different to every person. Nonetheless, I tried to construct gameplay mechanics that could inspire certain perspectives.  I did my best to make the game accessible to all people, not just ones with a specific stance on social issues.

1) The game is a thought experiment that removes the ambiguity of real life interaction. The trolls are blatantly bigoted and the warriors are justified in standing up against them. However, instead of only offering attack options that uphold that paragon virtue, I gave the player the choice to make an inflammatory character attack that is more effective against the troll at a small cost.  Without this choice, the game would have just been a one-dimensional exercise.

The game’s high score table encourages the player to defeat more trolls, feeding the temptation to compromise virtual morality for an emotionally-driven triumph over each troll. After all, it’s only a troll. I hope people realize this danger of labels turning an argument into an us-vs-them scenario which shifts the focus onto their opponents instead of the social issue.

2) Players face an endless series of one-on-one arguments with trolls. There is no victory condition so only 3 eventual outcomes are possible for the player: their mental faculties are worn down by conflict, their reputation is obliterated by the troll’s defamation or their own, or they ragequit. I hope players become more cognizant of the personal cost of engaging caustic individuals relative to what society will gain from the argument.

I’m not advocating letting racism, sexism, and other injustices go unchecked.  However, how often will arguing with a racist in the comments of a youtube music video change their worldview or their behavior?  Surely there is a better way for a socially conscious individual to spend that same time on activism that can educate many open minds instead of one stubborn one.

3) I hope that bystanders might be more understanding when they see someone respond to a discussion about social issues with a hostile comment. Instead of branding that person a “social justice warrior” and dismissing them outright, maybe they’ll consider that this person might have just been attacked by 12 trolls straight and is dealing with a low patience meter.

Likewise, a “troll” may just be a person speaking from their limited perspective of the world and the people in it, simply unable to empathize with your life experiences rather than being an inhuman monster.

I was in a chat room where someone was complaining about a heated online argument with a stranger in which they had become entangled. Another person advised them to play Social Justice Warriors and realize they were wasting their own time in conflict. That single reaction to the game made me feel justified that my game can have a positive impact.

Plus there’s always the chance that the game’s name and pixelated heroes will make the phrase “social justice warrior” seem so silly that people stop using it as a negative label altogether.

In light of these intentions, it was disappointing to watch people begin immediately assigning Social Justice Warriors dismissive labels of “pro-SJW game” and “anti-SJW game” after release.  I’ll be back next week with another post analyzing these reactions and how they turned Social Justice Warriors into a meta game beyond my wildest imaginings.

You can try Social Justice Warriors yourself and see how it alters your perspective for just $1 $8.  If you think the game has value, please vote for it on Steam Greenlight.  It was greenlit and releases on Steam February 27th. Thank you!

Social Justice Warriors Released

Social Justice Warriors is a satirical role-playing game that transforms you into a crusader for online morality, a champion of internet justice, and the lone defender standing valiantly against the encroaching morass of willful human ignorance.

Created in response to the list of “social justice warrior” videogame journalists to avoid, Social Justice Warriors translates the standard medieval fantasy heroes of role-playing games into social media crusaders facing an endless horde of ignorant, bigoted internet trolls.




update, update, so many updates

The last couple months have been a whirlwind of new developments and site updates always seem to get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list in favor of making games.

For a quick rundown, I crunched hard to get 5 functional characters into Afterdeath, attended GDC in San Francisco for my first time, got horribly sick afterward with a foreign illness that my immune system didn’t know how to handle (I blame Thomas Noppers!), devised a brand new game in response to a videogame controversy-of-the-week, and then crunched hard to make that game as fast as possible despite a multi-day power outage.

Whew.

Some of those things deserve their own posts, particularly GDC which was completely packed with exciting stories and events.  I’ll try to keep moving that up my to-do list.

For now, here’s the latest Afterdeath gameplay video I have to share.  It shows four very different characters getting across Thanatos Chasm.  I’ll have more Afterdeath videos of the new characters to share soon and lots of big news about the new game, Social Justice Warriors.

Dev Perspective – Investing Time in Indie Dev

dev_perspective

This Dev Perspective shares my insights into the time investment of becoming an indie developer.  It was originally written as a guest column for Continue Play.

In 2012 when I revived the idea of creating Afterdeath, the kind of platformer I’d like to play, I was starting completely from scratch.

I hadn’t taken programming classes, I possessed very little experience with digital art and animation, and I was completely inexperienced with marketing or social media platforms like Twitter or Reddit.  I did have some on-the-job programming experience building autonomous robots and crafting internal automation for a software company but nothing like designing a full-scale commercial game that needs to run on thousands of people’s computers, Xboxes, and even Ouyas.

Don’t Quit the Day Job

If you’re starting your first game, you have a lot to learn.  There will be bugs to fix, mistakes to undo, projects scrapped and started over.  While you’re running this gauntlet, income from your game remains a distant gleaming on the horizon.  The discipline required to make financially successful games with streamlined development schedules takes experience beyond the scope of your first game, so don’t cripple yourself by depending on your game (or worse, a Kickstarter) to pay your bills.  Keeping a full-time or part-time job while you develop your project lets you focus on what really matters: making a great game.

While this does set you back at least 40 hours a week, it’s far more valuable to keep your game development from turning into a stressful experience as the months pass.  A happy dev is a productive dev.

From Hobby to Full-Time Job

While designing a game starts as a hobby, you’ll soon realize that it’s not just the equivalent of one full-time job, but many.  An indie developer has to wear (or outsource) many hats: programmer, artist, animator, musician, sfx mixer, tester, marketing extraordinaire, and salesman.

I treated my game dev like I would any job; I logged all my hours and tasks on a timesheet.  I consider this practice invaluable.  It lets me see that I’m making regular progress, keeps me motivated, and shows me what tasks demand the most of my time.  Plus, metrics and graphs!  I look forward to releasing all my collected stats along with Afterdeath so people can see that it’s more than just a collection of compiled code; it’s a piece of my life.

95 weeks of dev time

You can see the transformation from a hobby to a job, as game dev stopped being a weekend activity and became a lifestyle.  Combined with the 40 hours per week at my day job, this represents a regular 60-80 hours of labor each week.  There are a few dips at major holidays and a severe spike when I used a week of vacation time at my day job to work nonstop on an IGF submission, but the trend continues to rise.  This graph doesn’t just represent progress on the game, but declined dinner invitations, missed movies, and months of sleep deprivation.  It takes a significant commitment to finish a game that’s large in scope (2213 hours and counting!) and the timeline will always be longer than you planned.

Always Start Small

The best advice I can offer aspiring devs is to delay making the game of your dreams and start small instead.  If you’re smart about it, you can make small games that form the foundation of your dream game, but can still be released as standalone titles after months of work instead of years.  This offers the added benefit of helping you to raise funds for a larger game while getting your name out there in the gaming community.  That’s a better alternative to starting a Kickstarter asking for $100,000 to build an MMO from scratch.

An easy way to get into game dev with smaller games is to participate in the frequent game jams hosted by the community.  These jams have short timelines and simple goals, usually just a theme or a phrase to guide your game design.  Committing 48 hours or a week of your time to making a game is an easy way to start and you’ll find that the hard deadline actually encourages your creativity rather than constraining it.  Recent jams included FlappyJam and CyberPunkJam.  The 7-day roguelike jam just began this week and it’s not too late to participate.  In the future, you can join the Ludum Dare or One Game A Month community challenges as well.

Some may ask why I didn’t follow this advice myself, starting out making a platformer with six playable characters and six worlds encompassing more than a hundred levels.  It’s a matter of perspective.  Afterdeath is my stepping stone to an even more ambitious game.


You can find more information about Afterdeath on the Nonadecimal website and can participate in the laborious conclusion to my dev cycle by following @Nonadecimal.

Scythe Theft

Last week I added the opening cutscene to the start of Level 1.  I’m pleased with how it turned out.  Undead Icarus is now fully playable too. I’ll follow up with some Icarus videos soon.

I’m going to GDC in less than 2 weeks so I’ve been pushing hard to add new content to the game.  In the next two weeks I would like to fix up the Captain Buzzkill puppeteer that lets you chase the robot through levels and add it to most of the existing levels to provide some extra engagement.

I’m also working on adding a fifth playable character before GDC. Can you believe Afterdeath has five characters already? I can’t!

Destined for GDC

I’m heading to GDC, the big game developers conference in San Francisco, for the first time this year.  I’ll be in SF from March 19-22 and if you’re there too and want to meet up and talk games or show me your project, let me know on twitter.

I’m maintaining a twitter list of all the games people I know who are attending to make it easier to find interesting events and opportunities throughout the week.  Let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

I’ll carry Afterdeath with me everywhere I go so give me a shout if you’d like to play it yourself.  It’s currently packing a challenging 50 levels across 4 worlds, along with 4 playable characters.  Check them out in the video below and then try it yourself.

first look at Icarus

I’m not very interested in football so I spent the game designing the animations for a new unlockable Afterdeath character.  Undead Icarus is the second unlockable character and can be found in Valhalla, after escaping from Cliffs of Despair.

Undead Icarus takes flight

Icarus’ playstyle matches the world of Valhalla where he is found, recklessness.  If you dare to wait an extra second, you can power up his jump to get even higher. Then, once you’re airborne, you can hold the jump button to glide, slowing your descent while constantly accelerating to the side.  At this time, there’s no maximum limit on his speed so you can race to the end of the level as fast as your reflexes can handle.